The Complete Matrix Tapes

The conventional wisdom is that the Velvet Underground were at their best on stage, and the high points of The Complete Matrix Tapes bear that out. You can think of The Complete Matrix Tapes as a greatly expanded, better-mixed version of 1969 with less perfect sequencing and four songs missing.

The Velvet Underground were pioneers with blazing heads, Jesus' sons and daughter, the progenitors of seemingly everything that came after them. Assessing the four studio albums they released between 1967 and 1970 on the Pitchfork scale is like measuring a yardstick. They were also a perpetually struggling touring rock group like any other, playing extended engagements at large and small clubs all over the East and West Coasts, often two shows a night, to an audience of people who mostly just wanted to dance. The Complete Matrix Tapes is a document of that side of the band: Supposedly, it's a collection of the 42 songs the band played in two nights at a 100-capacity San Francisco club, The Matrix, some of which formed the bulk of 1969: The Velvet Underground Live with Lou Reed 40 years ago.

The conventional wisdom is that the Velvet Underground were at their best on stage, and the high points of The Complete Matrix Tapes bear that out. The peculiarly thin sonics of Matrix owner Peter Abram's recordings don't do Maureen Tucker's caveman drumming any favors, but they make a serious case for Sterling Morrison as God-Emperor of Rhythm Guitarists. The first disc's magnificent "What Goes On", with Morrison and Lou Reed's guitars chattering together at breathless speed while Doug Yule hammers at an organ, is the wellspring for, among other things, the Wedding Present's entire catalogue; "Ocean" is the seed and the soil for both Low and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The version of the throwaway two-line rocker "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together" on disc two is utterly thrilling, and the hushed, droning "Heroin" later in that set is a solid 20 years ahead of its time. Both "White Light/White Heat" and "I'm Set Free" are much more dramatic and vivid here than in their studio incarnations.

That said, some of the Matrix box's extended vamps get draggy, and there's a lot of song duplication here: four versions apiece of "Some Kinda Love", "Heroin", and "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together", three apiece of "There She Goes Again" and "I'm Waiting for the Man", two apiece of seven others. But The Complete Matrix Tapes is useful as a way to hear how the Velvets constantly reworked their repertoire. Yule later said of Reed that "there were times when he would invent or put together songs on the fly in a performance, and he'd just turn around and say, 'Follow me'". The bizarre take on "I'm Waiting for the Man" that opens the box is slowed down to a crawling blues, extended to 13 minutes with some seemingly extemporaneous new verses; "Lisa Says", which the group had recorded in a studio just a month earlier, has almost totally rewritten lyrics and an entirely new bridge. Their most protean song, "Sister Ray", turns up in a relatively relaxed, noodly 37-minute performance that's far from its face-melting White Light/White Heat incarnation.

This box isn't exactly a grand opening of the vaults: as nice as it is to have all this stuff in one place, less than a quarter of it hasn't been officially issued before, and it's not like there's a shortage of Velvet Underground live recordings that could stand to be released for real. On the other hand, you can think of The Complete Matrix Tapes as a greatly expanded, better-mixed version of 1969 with less perfect sequencing and four songs missing, and considered that way, it's a jewel with a chip knocked off its top. Elliott Murphy's liner notes for *1969—*written in 1972, when the Velvet Underground were still a commercial nonentity with an enthusiastic but tiny cult—imagined a kid a hundred years later, in a "classical rock'n'roll class," listening to the Velvets and wondering what to make of them. We're close to halfway there now, and their place in the canon is secure, but we still haven't entirely figured them out.